Timing Your Run

Before you can time your run, you need to have your story ready. Think about it, if you had a chance to sell your campaign launch to an audience, you’d better have your pitch (story) prepared and ready to roll.

I’m going to share a trick to building your story quickly: Go through the process of pitching it to someone who can play the devil’s advocate – have them question and challenge anything in your pitch. Things that you say that are not believable, salable or cannot be effectively backed up will automatically be skimmed out or refined.

I often play the devil’s advocate to help my clients strengthen their pitches. We record the sessions and transcribe the final (hiredhand.com). Each further sessions would bring you closer to satisfying your devil’s questions and the words that you choose (or script) will keep improving until it covers every conceivable challenge. When pitching to these people, notice the areas in the pitch that trigger the most attention and participation.

Arrange your final script until it is concise and yet leaves nothing unanswered. When you can give the final script to a different prospect to read through without the need for them to ask any further questions, you have successfully built your sales page. Once you have done that you need to plan a story around it and break the story down into a sequence that spreads over your campaign timeline, setting milestones in your Facebook fan page.

This sequence should include all the different media content you will be using to tell the story along the timeline over a set period of time between start and end dates. Your timeline to launch should have all of the different aspects of development, marketing and sales planned out. You can build separate timelines and schedules for these different components if you want.

After defining the sections, we have to determine where to introduce our arsenal of emotional triggers to encourage the audience to take action. Once this is done all that’s left to do is to plan your content. You will need 6 different pieces of content to tell each section of your story. For content, you can have contests, images, infographics, videos, podcasts, audio interviews, press releases, and notes/articles; there are so many low cost options these days that choosing the right combination is often the toughest thing to do.